Yesterday's Governance

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 9

I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

If society has been transformed, how do we run it? Chapter 9 begins the final section of Dator’s book, on the type of governance (meaning government institutions plus the other supporting infrastructure like families and schools) that would suit a dream society. His argument has two layers: first, the US Constitution was a novel, clever solution for the late agricultural society it found itself in, but we’ve had two or three major social transformations since that the text hasn’t caught up with (the next chapter explores how the system fails us today); second, that the structure of institutions matters — governance is more about building rules that lead to the desired behaviors and outcomes, than it is about philosophy or beliefs¹. If politics bores (or enrages) you, you may want to zone out for a few weeks.

As evidence, he presents a list of problems the founders faced and their solutions in the Constitution. The items won’t surprise anyone who was paying attention: getting popular acceptance while limiting direct democratic input; accounting for the interests of the existing states, with a bicameral legislature and compromises on slavery; making the document hard to change so their careful work wasn’t easily undone. You can see the Enlightenment mindset at work here: they’re designing, building, and carefully winding a piece of clockwork, not creating a living organism.

Identity and Authority

I have one thought-rabbit I want to chase this week, at the risk of being divisive. Dator quotes approvingly from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, to the effect that the Constitution doesn’t reflect input from, and thus cannot represent the values of, any group of people beyond white, property-holding men. I started reading A People’s History maybe 15 years ago and only got a few chapters in because I found it so tedious. The book shares interesting stories of events that expand and complicate the American story, such as the Whiskey Rebellion, but underlying it all is the Marxist belief that class and class struggle are the explanation for events. If there is harmony in a settlement, it’s because the elite have turned the common people against the Indians; if disharmony, it’s because the common people have found solidarity with the Indians against the elites. After enough times hearing new events being forced into the same framework, I lost interest.

Part of the core issue is that I don’t think class, or sex, or race, or their various intersections, reliably determine a person’s sympathies and allegiances. As one example, the modern theory of “elite overproduction” posits that we’re making too many lawyers, Ivy League graduates, etc, for our society to absorb into good jobs and prestige. This explains why Donald Trump and those in his orbit, elites who feel wronged by and angry toward other elites, are currently ascendant, and political norms have been deteriorating for the last few decades.

So if identity isn’t a straight shot to behavior, then a system of governance designed by one group of people isn’t doomed to only represent that group’s interests. This isn’t an endorsement of paternalism, but an acknowledgement that feeling responsibility for others in the social order was and is a real phenomenon, what Thomas Jefferson thought of as benevolent patriarchy and the French called noblesse oblige before they decided to noblesse guillotine. Whenever New York taxes soda or the FDA bans food dye, it’s largely urban elites making decisions for everyone, and most people are on board as long as it’s their team making the change.

American society today has an allergy to authority, from “not my president” to gentle parenting. Andy Hines’s ConsumerShift describes the way the Modern value of subversion of established systems morphs into the Postmodern nonconformity more generally (p. 86). Maybe the rejection of the legitimacy of existing hierarchies is a good piece of evidence that, as Dator argues, the existing institutions of governance are past their expiration date, and something new needs to be built to support the Dream Society.

Bonus Content: Pantheon

Last week I mentioned the second season of Pantheon in the context of thinking hard about new kinds of digital “persons” with their own dignity and rights. I finished the season this week, and I was blown away at the futures thinking its finale evidences. Season 1 does a good job showing how ambiguous a transformation can look in the beginning, and Season 2 does the best job I’ve ever seen at carrying those ideas forward and showing how absolutely weird and unfamiliar transformation can make the world. If you enjoyed Season 1 or DEVS, definitely check it out.

1. Several times, Dator comes close to using the word incentives, but, being a political scientist rather than an economist, can’t quite bring himself to do it.